Of Friendship and Mountain Trolls
by Valieara
Summary: But mostly of friendship. Preepilogue Deathly Hallows goodness and fluff.


**Disclaimer:** I own nothing.

**Setting/Spoilers:** For _Deathly Hallows_, set between the last chapter and the epilogue.

**Notes:** My first real fluff piece, with no ulterior motives. Written because I have been reading Sorcerer's Stone and am enjoying all too much, despite the fact that I've read it several times, the fact that the way Hermione became friends with Harry and Ron was that she nearly died by an escaped mountain troll's hand. That, and the juxtaposition of older-Hermione to eleven year old-Hermione is fun.

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"Mum?"

Hermione looked up as a little girl crawled almost into her lap, at the last moment aborted the original objective due to the fact that now, at nearly eleven years old, she was much too old to be doing so. Her mother sighed at this self-conceived fact, and gently pulled her daughter against her side, where Rose was content to have her auburn curls stroked.

"Yes, sweetheart?" Hermione asked, her eyes still skimming over the parchment that lay in front of her.

"You and dad and Uncle Harry met at Hogwarts, right?" her daughter inquired.

Hermione, knowing her daughter knew this perfectly well, recognized a lead-in question, and looked up. "What about it?"

She sincerely hoped Rose hadn't gotten her hands on any modern magical history books; she and Ron had been quite strict about that, deciding that knowing the extent of her parents' involvement in the latest wizarding war was something their children didn't need, especially so young. Harry had been quite in agreement with them, having been hardly as ready for it at eleven _or_ seventeen as either Ron or Hermione; and along with his own children, Rose and Hugo knew the minimum of what there was to know. Seventeen, they had all mutually agreed, was the age their children could and should know; and at that time, a box of still-animate photographs of their teenage selves and notes and bits of parchment would be hauled off its high shelf in her and Ron's house.

It was the psychological effect of it all, Hermione had argued after Ginny'd had James. Journals and diaries and records feverishly kept for the sake of keeping their own sanity, or for some future remembrance of the truth of history and memory – they held too much for a casual reader. Emotion and feeling, slow descents into what at one point might have been madness.

Ginny, at the very least, understood this, even twenty-four years past her own experience.

As for her own written account of the whole ordeal, it had been so protected by charms sometime after Rose's birth she knew not even her daughter could have gotten her hands on it.

There were, after all, drawbacks to having one's child be at least as intelligent, if not as knowledgeable, as you were. There were times Hermione quite feared for her sanity.

"Dad keeps making jokes about trolls and dragons."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Don't worry about him. Hogwarts is perfectly safe, darling. We wouldn't send you there if it wasn't. I trust Minerva McGonagall with my life."

"He's said things about barely escaping with your lives," Rose pressed.

"He's exaggerating," Hermione countered, making a mental note to have a talk with Ron, and going back to the sheet in front of her.

"Uncle Harry said once it was lucky dad made you cry your eyes out your first year," Rose continued.

In retrospect, it wasn't the best idea to be multitasking while navigating her way around such questions. Rose wanted an answer, and her mother was too used to supplying them.

"It's an odd way of putting he's glad we're all friends, I suppose, but it works." She caught Rose's glance out of the corner of her eye, and distracted, continued. "Harry and your father saved me from a mountain troll that was intent on beating me to death where I was hiding in the girls' bathroom. It was all your father's fault, naturally."

It was only a few seconds later that it registered in her mind what bit of misinformation she'd confirmed.

Trolls at Hogwarts. Her daughter's eyes were wide.

"Oh, dear," she muttered desperately. "Rose…"

"DAD!"

Ron wouldn't stop laughing at her all evening.


End file.
